Roger and Me.

THIS IS an age of eroding boundaries; the one between fact and fiction is no exception. For example, any performer on a major soap opera can tell you about stacks of warning letters he or she receives from viewers about some other character on the soap, about some secret vices that character has revealed only to a third one and some ten million TV watchers. Soap-opera fans can no longer tell that the show is not reality. And what about the much less sappy souls who nevertheless believe that what they see in a documentary is the truth tout court? It never occurs to them that there exists a thing called point of view, and that inclusion or exclusion of data is consciously or unconsciously affected by it, that the filmmaker's choices represent a slant on the facts, on the "truth."

This can get highly complicated. Take the recent Roger and Me, in which Michael Moore showed, or tried to show, how Roger Smith, the CEO of General Motors, brought misery to Flint, Michigan, by plant shutdowns and the laying off of thousands of workers. It was a grimly humorous and enormously persuasive film, and many people besides Roger Smith emerged as callous brutes or risible fools. Subsequently, it was revealed that Moore took many liberties with chronology and context to give the film dramatic shape and to make some people look worse and others (e.g., himself) better than they were. Anatole France, to be sure, spoke of une histoire plus vraie que la veriti, and Moore, too, defended himself as pursuing the spirit rather than the letter of the truth.

Then why, however, his anger when the film was not nominated for an Oscar in the documentary category? And why his anger now when video stores stock the film on the documentary rather than the feature-film (i.e., fiction) shelves, where, granted, rentals are considerably brisker? Can it be that what is fact on a reel becomes fiction in a cassette?